LuneOS April Stable Release: Café au lait

No April Fools jokes here folks. Just a fresh cup of the April LuneOS stable build, Café au lait or “au lait” for short. Lots of changes this month. There better be since we didn’t produce a changelog for last month’s nightlies-only releases, amirite? Hopefully we haven’t disappointed you.

General focus reminder

We get naysaying questions and comments via Twitter from time to time. They’re usually about “it’s a two horse race” or “you’ll never be able to saturate the market” or “it’s an old OS before you’ve even released it”.

The main focus of LuneOS is to provide an operating system which is driven by the community and continues what we love(d) about webOS. We’re not trying to reach feature comparison with Android or iOS but rather building a system to satisfy basic needs in the mobile environment. Building a good quality mobile operating system from scratch is a hard job and is built in just the spare free time everyone involved in the project has. To get the best ratio between what we want and what we can do, we’re analyzing architectural decisions from both existing solutions we can base our work on and whether we have to write things from scratch.

Our focus is not to add new devices as they appear on the market but instead to provide a stable, easy to use and easy to port software base. Porting OS pieces itself was never the real problem of our approach since we solved the most important bits by using libhybris. The actual problem we’re facing is to get applications software implemented and to add all the back-end functionalities to the system we love and need.

We’re not in the cell phone or tablet business. We’re making a fun, user-centric mobile OS that can be ported to whatever device you can put it on in the future. The Nexus 4 is an easy canvas to use to make a stable OS. The TouchPad was added to increase dev involvement since most of us had them laying around anyway. Got it? 🙂

Don’t forget to contact us with any questions and feel free to join the discussion on the webOS Nation forums. Catch us on Twitter @webosports on IRC: Freenode:#webos-ports or email webos.ports@gmail.com.

See you next month! We’re getting closer and closer to being able to use LuneOS as a daily driver.